How to separate Gold from black sand easily and get all the gold out

hey I'm Chris Ralph the professional prospector and today we're gonna took take a look at black sands it's something that prospectors have to deal with if you're out panning or sluicing dry washing high banking anything where you're processing gravels you're gonna end up with some black sand and you're gonna have to process it to separate the gold out of it now this actually is stuff that I process previously but today we're gonna take a look at two separate samples and the process of getting the gold out of it we want clean gold that we can store or keep or sell to a refiner if that's what you want to do so it's not really very saleable when you have a few pieces floating through a big old pan full of black sand so what we're gonna do today is I'm gonna process a small sample of black sand that I have that has some gold in it I know because I've seen it we're gonna take it all the way down to clean gold and then I have a special package here from a friend of mine by the name of Rob Roy and Rob has his own channel Washington Beach mining he mines black sands on an Ocean Beach and actually there are some ocean beaches you know Nome is probably the most favorite but most famous but there are a lot of others too and Rob has sent me a sample of his black sand concentrates in which he added a quarter of a gram of gold and my challenge on this is going to be to get at least a quarter of a gram of gold out of it now I'm not going to go through every step with you guys but I will explain the whole process and demonstrate all of what I'm doing so that you can see it now in the past prospectors commonly used mercury but I don't recommend mercury today there's potentials dangerous things if you don't treat it properly it can be hazardous and but I do admit I used to use mercury in the past here is some amalgam that I made for myself in the old days I used to take all my dredging concentrates the black sand from that and I would take out what gold I could easily take out but the last black sand that had some really fine gold in it that was hard to remove I would usually you know get it down and I'd be dredging and yet every years concentrates down to just a few tablespoons of black sand and then I'd put that little last little bit in the jar with some mercury and I'd swirl it around and you know after a number of years I pulled it out and I ran the mercury through a squeegee through a cloth and this is the cloth that I actually ran it through and squeezed out the the loose liquid mercury and I ended up with this chunk of amalgam well you know when I processed this I got a better than half an ounce of gold out of it but it was more than a decade's worth of dredging in and the fine fine gold that was left behind but still it was a nice haul anyway there's a lot of potential problems with mercury and you know the regulators today are really afraid of it and you know if handled properly it can be safe but if handled improperly it really can be pretty dangerous but I've developed a better way and that's what I'm going to demonstrate to you today a better way of getting clean gold just using panning and normal panning techniques and some magnets now people have used magnets before and and there's a danger to magnets you know you put the moon in you know you get an entire glob a goal or glob a black sand out but this black sand will have gold trapped in it and that's the downside of magnets is too you put them in too fast and they suck up everything and you end up with not just black sand on the map it but you end up losing gold with it - so I'm gonna talk to you today my techniques for how not to lose gold with your black sand what we're gonna actually start with is a fairly weak magnet this is a magnet I got out of a speaker this is a moderately strong magnet that we're going to use and then a big super strong I keep it in protection so I don't get my fingers pinched a very strong magnet at the very end but we're gonna use them in steps and I'm going to demonstrate this whole process to you so if you want to find out how to make clean gold out of your black sand then stick around we're gonna go through the whole thing together so for some people black sand is a kind of a mysterious substance like what is it it's the heavy part of what you get when you process sand and gravel but you know it can contain in addition to just gold platinum diamonds tin tungsten all kinds of stuff so let's talk about first let's you know sit down and talk about what is black sand and what is it really made of so what is black sand you know that's a question some people ask and like I say it is a mystery to some well it forms because many minerals in the earth are not really stable to weathering and the effect of rain water and oxygen that changes them and literally rocks that are super hard and strong will eventually get weathered and become soft and this is basically how soil is formed you know dirt and that sort of thing because the minerals in some rocks just break down and become soft and porous well some of the minerals are more durable and these are the ones that survive to get freed as particles and enter into streams heavy minerals are the durable ones have well that have above-average density most are dark-colored because they contain iron but that summer lighter the most common heavy minerals that form your heavy concentrate sands include hematite magnetite garnet ilmenite rutile and zircon now of these only zircon is light-colored okay the rest of them are all dark and these accumulations are found in stream beds where the stream flow energy is sufficient to carry away the low-density minerals like clays or even to a certain extent the quartz sand but the heavy minerals get left behind and included with the heavy minerals that are durable is any gold okay that's why gold because it's also heavy like the minerals I just mentioned it it accumulates in your heavy black sands thus the heavy minerals that are resistant to weathering and abrasion concentrate in certain areas in a stream you're like that inside bands and behind boulders and that sort of things and even though these heavy minerals may only be a small percentage of the local rocks they tend to accumulate in addition to the gold in placer mining some deposits also carry things like cassiterite which is an ore of tin and chromite which is like it sounds an ore of chromium and diamond platinum and zircon actually zircon is a mineral that contains a rare metal called zirconium that is used in certain things so this is a little bit about what black sand is and certainly it's common stuff if you're a placer miner you'll end up like I do with a lot of this kind of thing that you have to deal with so what are exactly those minerals well magnetite is an an iron oxide and contains both ferric and fair us iron ions and it's strongly magnetic and it usually is a large percentage of blacks and hematite is another iron oxide dark in color but only very weakly magnetic and it's found and a moderate amount in a lot of blacks and ilmenite is an iron and titanium oxide that is very slightly magnetic and is usually a small portion of the box and garnet and usually you dark in but you know one of the things about what purse the percentage of these are as it varies a lot I mean in some places there's loads of magnetite in other places there's hardly any in some places there's loads of garnet like I say it's variable the proportion there are places where the heavy sands are deep red in color because of all the garnet that's inside them zircon is another heavy mineral and says they're Konya mineral like I say part various pyroxenes and ant the balls these have iron usually in them and so they're dark in color and then rutile which is a titanium oxide it's not magnetic and usually these are all small parts but they are a part of black sands in a lot of different places now there are some rare minerals found in black sand and I mentioned one of these consider right which is a tin it's a basically the most important or of tin it's valuable in some classes plasters and in fact in some places the placer mining is not done for gold it's actually placer is mined for its tin content because there's so much consider right in the in the heavy concentrates the same thing with chromite which is valuable in some places wolframite which is a tungsten mineral important tungsten ore and again it's it's valuable in some places and then of course there are certainly placer diamonds that are mined it's not very common but you know in some places where there are significant placer diamonds then yeah it's very valuable same thing with platinum it's rare but it's valuable in some places monocyte which is a rare earth mineral again valuable in some places and she like another tungsten mineral also valuable in some places where there's enough of this these rare things in the gravel that they can be mined for these unusual minerals so today we're going to be using a standard finishing pan to take out these take care of these black sands but there are other ways of doing it and other guys have other techniques mhm I'm not saying mine is the only one there are a lot of different ways to process black sands one popular way is with the blue ball a blue ball actually is pretty good because you're letting the flow of water do the work for you and I can tell you a little bit about it okay so I've got my concentrates my black sands into my finishing pan and this stuff is you know it's got black sand in it but it's not super duper difficult the first thing I'm going to do though with this is there's still some quartz sand and other light materials left in there so I'm gonna just kind of shake it real good to let the gold settle down and then I'm gonna wash off the lighter materials I'm gonna do this until I've gotten most of the most of the black sand and other light materials out and I'm getting down to the end you see I shake it again and more light materials come to the surface that I can wash off there's a lot of different small finishing pans out there - this isn't the only one excuse the train in the distance you know I'm only about a quarter a mile from the railroad tracks and they make a lot of noise but anyway I'm not gonna have you sit and watch me as I go through panning this down I'm gonna go ahead and do it and then I'll come back to you and show you them you the step using the magnets and you'll note that I'm panning into a tub so I'm not gonna lose anything anyway I'll be back in just a minute okay so I've gone through and taken out as much as the light material as I can and then I'm gonna use my larger pan with a big bottom the big flat underside and I'm gonna start spreading this out as thin as I can because the whole idea of using magnets is like I say you don't want to suck up the gold along with the black sand and so I'm gonna hold this I'm going to start with the weakest magnet and I'm going to hold it above the material and shake it as I go and see I'm getting just a little bit a little bit I'm getting the strongest and most magnetic stuff to stick to the magnet not collecting a whole lot with this really weak magnet well I'm getting some and we're taking out some of the strongest magnetics and I've got some there so I'm just going to peel that off wash it off my hands see this is the case we're having a weaker magnet is actually better you can shake it to get any loose material off because a weak magnet like this will not have the strength very well to suck up to suck up magnetics and gold at the same time and I've got this well I would suggest if you're doing something like this for the first time that you go into a a test a test pain you'll pan into a tub and that's the the first shot the first go-round is with this weak magnet okay so I'm finishing up with the weak magnet shake it to make sure that there's nothing there and the next step you should be able to start to see in the pan that I'm getting some decent gold it's starting to show now I'm using the stronger magnet and I will shake it around and keep it well above the surface there because we don't want to suck up anything from that includes gold probably also seeing that my the black sands are getting lighter you know that we're basically sucking up a lot of the magnetic portion of the black sand and the remainder is more Brown okay so the final step is going to be the really powerful magnet so I'll get that out and it will suck up a lot of things that the other magnet just won't but what's happened is we've gotten all the really strongly magnetic stuff out already one little piece that got stuck it is possible there are some bits of gold that get wrapped around the little piece of magnetite or they grow around a little piece of magnetite and so you have to be careful when using a magnet take a look you know make sure you're not accidentally sucking up one of those types of pieces of gold okay that's about it for the the heavy-duty magnet and you can see it didn't get as much as the the medium magnet even though it's a lot stronger simply because there just isn't that much left to get and now I'll switch back to the finishing pan okay so I'm back to having my gold in the little pan and I'm just going to use a standard kind of panning technique of shaking and washing eventually when I get down to just the goal I'll be a little doing a little more bit of special shaking and and washing but this takes a little while to go through and wash the rest of this off although it's it's way easier once that the magnetic portion of the sand is removed it's just loads easier because what's left is some dark colored minerals that aren't nearly as dense than some light colored minerals like zircon that aren't nearly as dense and some remaining bit of quartz and which isn't dense at all so I'm gonna do this and get it down to the very end I'll show you the last little end steps that I do to take it to pure clean gold okay so I filmed this last segment yesterday to show you the technique that I use at the very end to get the gold clean and all the other segments came out fine this segment didn't come out right so we're gonna do it over again today and basically I've reset up what I had there which is the the gold and the last little bit of blacks and so on this thing I do kind of a circular washing technique and I use my fingers a lot just to wash out you know you could push back any gold you see and push forward the blacks and and it goes fairly fast I mean really it's it's not that difficult to process your thumb is very handy to use almost all of this it's blacks and the goal wants to stay in the in the middle because it's heavier when you circle around like that the blacks and just works its way out and it doesn't take too long and you're down to a pretty clean final product and if you do it in the Sun you can see the gold pretty plainly will cut forward on this kind of speed the process up just so I can get to the end and show you the clean gold you also have the option of not necessarily dipping the entire pan in just the part where there's the box and sticking out another technique is just to let the water flow out very slowly the gold because it's heavier than the black sand will want to stay behind you can see I pretty much got this to a completely clean bit of gold at the end ready for weighing up ready for storage ready for shipment to a refiner all done so I was gonna do a whole nother section about the beach sand but this has been so long it's been such a long video set that I'm gonna do a part two and we'll take a look at the blue ball and the beach sand and we'll work on it and you'll get to see all of that in part 2 coming up but right now if you want to be a better prospector I've got a book that I've written and I want to tell you a little bit more about that ok so I wanted to tell you a little bit more about my book I want it to be able to share the knowledge that I've gained about finding gold and how to be successful and so I spent years literally writing this book Fistful of gold it's more than 350 pages long and which is why I say it's an encyclopedia of everything you need to know about finding your own gold I've sold more than eight thousand copies and I've got a lot of really great feedback on it it just is the most complete book on the market it has information about finding gold that literally is not available in any other book that you're gonna find for prospectors because I took technical stuff from geologists and other mineral scientists and I've translated that into language that the average guy can understand you don't need a PhD to go out and find gold but the information that scientists have learned over recent decades can can be of a lot of help to people so it's in this book if you're interested about finding gold panning sluicing nugget detecting a dry washing the geology of gold deposits and how they form it's all in here and like I say it's more than 350 pages long so if you'll just go to the description underneath this video you can take a look I've got a link in there to take you to Amazon to the site where the book is sold and think you'll you'll really enjoy it take a look at all the people who've commented on this and have really liked the book it has a very very high rating for a book and also I have a website my own free website that you can take a look at I've got all kinds of information on here about doing research and how to find gold a lot of good information stuff that basically couldn't fit into my book and so I put it on this website and I have a link also for that in the video description so take a look in the description and you can click on the link and it'll take you to my website and finally if you like this presentation I've got a lot more coming out here's a three and a half ounces of gold that I found a couple years back in one area I've got a lot more of these videos coming on gold gemstones hardrock placer a lot of metal detecting there'll be lots of metal detecting stuff so if you really enjoyed this click the subscribe button and then take the notification bell off and YouTube will let you know when I publish new stuff and hit the like button as well and please comment on these videos because I'm interested in what you have to say and I promise to answer any questions you have so if you are wondering about anything you're thinking maybe I didn't cover something thoroughly enough in a video then let me know and I'll be happy to try and help you out and give you whatever information you need so thanks a lot and I hope you enjoyed this and we'll see you again real soon [Music]

Channel: Chris Ralph, Professional Prospector

Views: 90,880

Keywords: Black sand, clean gold, how to process black sands

Id: 8FMszuPoPoY

Length: 26min 26sec (1586 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 04 2019